Office Contact

Regional Cooperation Council (RCC)
Roma Integration 2020

Ruzveltova 61
11000 Belgrade
Serbia

Tel:

+381 (11) 4046 891

Fax:

+381 (11) 4046 894

E-mail:

romaintegration2020@rcc.int

The second
meeting of the Committee for Monitoring the Implementation of the Strategy
for Social Inclusion of Roma and Egyptians in Montenegro 2016-2020 took
place on 18 May 2017 in Podgorica, convened by the National Roma Contact Point of
Montenegro, Mr Leon GJOKAJ, General Director at the Ministry of Human and
Minority Rights. RCCs Roma Integration 2020 Action Team was invited to
participate, besides the members of the Committee that include representatives
of the relevant ministries and the civil society. Additionally, at a request of
the Roma Integration 2020 Action Team, the expert engaged within the project to
assist Montenegrin government in improving the quality of the annual monitoring
report was present at the meeting.

The meeting
was opened by the NRCP by introducing the agenda. As the first item on the
agenda, the forthcoming activities within the RCC Roma Integration 2020 project
were discussed. The Action Team presented the available information to, and
agreed with the participants on the activities being co-organized by the team
and the NRCP, namely the National Platform for 2017 in Montenegro to be held on
5 July 2017 – exactly one year from the last Roma Seminar held in Montenegro, and
the in-country replication of the Public Budgeting of Roma Integration Policies
training planned for mid-June. The Action Team representatives briefly spoke
about other forthcoming activities, particularly those at regional level
(workshops and meetings), planned by the end of the year.

The
representative from the civil society asked about the possibility to replicate
the Monitoring and Reporting regional training in Montenegro, since not all
representatives of relevant institutions, including those working on the
monitoring and reporting of the implementation of the Strategy, were present at
the regional training. The Action Team clarified that the engagement of the
monitoring expert tasked to work with the authorities to improve the quality of
the report and to advice on possible improvements of the monitoring and
reporting process, as a hands-on-work model of training, responds to this need.

The
Commission discussed its Rules of Procedures as the next item on the agenda.
The item was discussed at length also during the previous Commission meeting
when the document was returned to the Ministry of Human and Minority Rights for
including the recommendations of the Commission. At this meeting, the document
was on the agenda for final comments and adoption. On demand by the civil
society representative the Commission agreed to make its decision by consensus,
and where not possible, by simple majority with a possibility for dissented
opinion by any member(s) of the Commission, and adopted the Rules of Procedures
with this amendment.

The regular
agenda item for sharing information by each institution on the state of the
implementation of the Strategy was considered covered with the submissions of
all the institutions to the annual report collected by the Ministry of Human
and Minority Rights as the coordinating institution in this process.

Most time of
the meeting was dedicated to the last agenda item on the monitoring report
according to the RCC Roma Integration 2020 template, by which institutions
previously submitted their inputs to the Ministry of Human and Minority. The
ministry collected all the inputs and submitted the report to the Action Team,
after which the Action Team engaged an expert, Ms Sanja ELEZOVIC, to work with
the institutions on improvement of the quality and content of the report and of
the monitoring and reporting process in general. The expert had a presentation
prepared for the meeting that was presented and discussed among the members of
the Commission. It focused on the most important challenges of the monitoring
and reporting process including:

Difference in terminologies
used in the template and by the institutions;

Missing baseline data from the
Strategy’s action plan required by the template, both in terms of values of the
indicators and other details of the plan (such as responsible institutions by
strategic goals);

Coverage of the term ‘overall
population’ depending on the definition of each indicator;

Difficulties in providing data
on the budget, particularly in cases where budgets don’t include specific Roma
integration item, but are rather general and measures from the Strategy are
implemented as general activities.

Discussions on this item
were explanatory for the Commission members. The presentation can be found for
downloading below.